When you think of downtown’s US Bank building, you usually think “the tallest building west of the Mississippi,” or that scene from Independence Day, or its buttoned-up denizens doing very serious work.
Or… you think of a girl dressed as a pizza.
Such is the case of RHUBARB STUDIOS, the innovation lab and shared-working space that opened at the beginning of 2015.
Rhubarb studios is the brainchild of Cauri Jaye, who – with co-founder Rebecca McLauchlan – has made a career of helping old-guard companies embrace the changes that come with technology. Jaye and his team help companies focus on culture, business, and product.
Formerly as a consultancy, rhubarb studios has gone through a few iterations prior to landing in its current space in the US Bank building.
Rhubarb studios is a collective space for creating hardware and software businesses, with the charge to help businesses, in Jaye’s words, “be around smart people, build cool stuff, and get shit done.”
When the time came to find a more permanent coworking space for his consulting enterprise, the US Bank building was a great fit — not only because it had excellent fiber for ultra-high speed internet, but because the largely buttoned-up white-collar building needed a bit of startup culture, to help usher in a lean startup vibe for a new generation.
[In recent years, coworking spaces have become the new Entertainment Districts — Entertainment Districts were built in the 90s to revitalize downtowns by attracting younger residents; these days, coworking spaces are acting as talent magnets for regional startup cultures around the world.]
Rhubarb studios has a wide range of clients — General Assembly grads and other folks looking to transition into new careers; startups building their businesses while being surrounded by other smart and creative people; and Fortune 500 companies looking to build incubators and agile teams, looking to break away from the layers of politics that can get in the way of quickly bringing a good product to light.
But yeah, back to that pizza thing. In addition to hosting entrepreneurs, classes, panels, and meetups, rhubarb studios has been known to bring some new blood to the old tower, whether it be flying drones from the rooftop, or hosting the early-morning dance party Daybreaker, back in February.
Dancers come in at early morning hours, get hopped up on coffee and kombucha, dance their asses off, then head out to work, all before 9am.
This presented a new set of challenges for the building, from 4am set up and pre-dawn valet service, to finance types sharing an elevator with a girl dressed as a pizza, to bass and bouncing being felt all the way up to the 65th floor.
It’s that same startup spirit that reverberates throughout the studio. The shared workspaces are modular, modeled after Stanford’s D School — so that tables, chairs, and workspaces can move around as needed, and all the surfaces are treated as a whiteboard, whether it be the windows, the walls, the floors, even the kitchen.
Rhubarb studios just opened up another portion of their floor to private team workspaces, and will soon launch a service called rhubarb coach – a curated job service that matches vetted, tested candidates with real jobs.
Rhubarb studios is also working with a few startups, including a motorized personal transport company www.rovr.club, and iVotify, an app which helps you find candidates who match your values, based on a series of questions, regardless of their party affiliation.
Expect more events in the coming months, especially as rhubarb studios establishes itself as the hub for DTLA’s exploding arts and tech scene, and as the area embraces initiatives introduced by Mayor Garcetti and his team. rhubarb studios is even working with the city to run a hackathon to solve the water crisis by creating upgraded technology to deal with water cleaning, collection and consumption.
Says Jaye of rhubarb studio’s role in DTLA’s innovation and growth, “Finance, fashion, manufacturing, architecture, legal, accounting, it’s all around us — they’re coming in all the time and talking to us. They’re all wrapping their head around the idea that they are going to have to change the way they do business, and how that’s going to work. We’re at the centre of it.”
Jaye credits DCBID and the CCA (not-for-profit organizations that form a connection with government and private enterprise) in helping rhubarb studios meet and connect with everyone in the surrounding community: “The community here is strong, everybody is asking, ‘How do we do this [embrace technology, innovation, and change] in the best possible way – and that’s what we do. All day, every day.”
